Beyond the Hype: Ilissa Miller on Responsible Growth, Data Centers and AI

So a l- there's a lot of tension around data centers, seems to come down to, you know, resources, like you talked about, like land and water and power.

How should companies think about that responsibly when they enter a community or even maybe before they enter a community?

Yeah, you know, it's really hard for the companies to do that and be the drivers of that, with few exceptions.

When it comes to investments, right, especially with the power grid upgrades, there are a lot of companies that are now committing to paying their own way and making sure that they are covering the cost for the infrastructure that they need.

There's a challenge with that in most cases, because you can cover the cost for what you need, but you can't cover the cost for the entire grid load and how that might affect all of the users, and so there's a challenge there.

For water use, developers and operators are already using and developing innovative technologies that have substantially reduced the amount of water that they need and use in their facilities.

They're using closed-loop systems.

Whether it's liquid cooling or water cooling closed loop, that is a way to continue to reuse water without having the need to replenish it.

It evaporates much less.

Yes, you're still using water, but nowhere near as much water as a golf course, for example, or a paper mill, for example.

And so what's starting to happen is that we are using, you know, energy and we are using, you know, water, but we're not using it to the volumes that, at least the water, to the volumes that the market seems to think.

And because it's such an emotional situation, that message isn't able to get through, because there's so much disbelief in this entire process that it's really hard to get those facts through.

The power situation is a big issue in and of itself, and other than paying our own way, I have to say that the utility companies and the energy companies have to help solve for this, right? And part of it is that they haven't upgraded the infrastructure in our country for a long time.

And because they're being asked to provide such volume of megawatts and gigawatts of capacity, they have to upgrade that infrastructure.

It requires much larger lines, direct transmission lines, right? But I have to say, it's not just for the data centers that they're upgrading these facilities.

It's for everything, right? We're c- And we've been having brownouts and blackouts and all of that, right? You know, I've been on this planet for over 50 years, and in my lifetime, I had two blackouts.

Before my lifetime, right, there weren't really blackouts.

And so when you think about that, we need an upgrade on our, in the entire nation's backbone, but not just for data centers.

It's for any future manufacturing, industrial, and high-end use for power.

And without that, we're going to be limiting ourselves as a country.